When a piece of content is recorded at a central device such as a customer premise equipment (CPE) device (e.g., gateway device, set-top box (STB), etc.), the recording typically becomes available to everyone with access to the CPE device. A common password (e.g., parental control personal identification number (PIN) or password) may be used to protect all stored recordings from either being played back or deleted. However, anyone with knowledge of the common password would not be precluded from deleting or playing back any of the content recorded at the CPE device. Moreover, recorded content protected by a common password may still be accessed by users over a local home media architecture (HMA) or digital living network alliance (DLNA) network. Currently, there is no way for a user to protect a recording from being viewed or deleted by other users within a premise.
In general, a CPE device might utilize an automatic deletion mechanism to clean up and make available more disk space. For example, the CPE device might be configured to detect when disk space is nearing exhaustion, and the CPE device can select one or more of the oldest recordings or least-accessed recordings for deletion in order to free up disk space. However, a user might have certain recordings that should be bypassed by the automatic deletion mechanism. Therefore, users are left without a mechanism for protecting recordings from being accessed by others or from being deleted by others or an automatic deletion mechanism, thus it is desirable to improve upon methods and systems for protecting recorded content at a CPE device.
Like reference numbers and designations in the various drawings indicate like elements.